She-Hulk #8 casts the spotlight on the Booths!

Everybody wants to be a Hulk. Ask any member of the Hulk family, though, and you’ll find that it’s not easy being green, as Mark and April Booth are about to learn in She-Hulk #8, written by Rainbow Rowell, drawn by Takeshi Miyazawa, colored by Rico Renzi and lettered by Joe Caramagna.

Armaan Babu: Stephanie. We are a pair of very smart nerds who are obsessed with She-Hulk, not unlike Mark and April Booth themselves. Is this issue trying to tell us something? Should we be worried about our futures? Or d’you think we’re safe because we’re not going out of our way to steal gamma-irradiated blood from the vaults of super scientists?

Stephanie Burt: Feeling pretty safe so far. Perhaps…. too safe.

April and Mark Were Designers

Armaan: I’ve been wondering whether Mark and April were villains I could care about. Rowell’s revealed very little about them so far. They’ve not been an intriguing mystery so much as they’ve been a distraction from the slice-of-life romantic comedy we’ve both been thoroughly enjoying. 

No distractions in She-Hulk #8, though: it’s ALL Mark and April. While they’re still not my favorite part of the book by a long shot, I’m definitely invested in their story. I’ve always been a sucker for villainous couples who are genuinely and deeply in love with each other. Titania and Absorbing Man come to mind as one of my favorites. They just seem to have so much more fun than superhero couples get to.

And that’s certainly the way it starts out, for the Booths. What’d you think of their story here, Stephanie? 

Stephanie: I… wanted to like it? I”m all for ostentatiously truly-in-love villain couples, especially when they’re Wife Guy plus Scheme Lady. I would read twenty issues of a comic that was nothing but Mystique + Destiny. But these two feel more like a couple in an animated cartoon than like a couple in a high quality, romance-focused Big Two comic. Mark looks hot, loves April and does science. April looks at Mark and wants him and power, not necessarily in that order. We keep hearing how much in love they are but I don’t see it. I just want to know how they became a threat to our Jen. And I’m afraid I guessed it before the comic let me know.

Armaan: I am amused by their motivations. Partly because they have a point — it’s a little ridiculous how many people stumble into their powers in the Marvel Universe. I can see wanting to try and improve on the design of accidental miracles.

The other part of my amusement comes from the fact that this seems to inadvertently be the same motivations of the villains in the recent Disney+ She-Hulk show with the Intelligencia. People who pride themselves on their intelligence, furious that She-Hulk didn’t earn her powers, stealing a vial of her blood to try and duplicate her powers.

Stephanie: Ding ding ding. Major spoiler for the excellent TV series coming up in this paragraph: the blood-stealing plot in the TV show strikes TV Jen as such a cliché that she breaks the fourth wall and bulldozes her way into Marvel TV’s highest offices in order to get that plot written out of her show. Of course the villains want Hulk blood. And Captain America super-soldier-serum. And Logan’s DNA, if they can get it. It’s an off-the-shelf plot and I know Rainbow Rowell has done and can do better. 

“People who try hard to get mega-super-powers should not have them” is a cape comics trope for good reason! Superhero powers are almost by definition violent: they disrupt social order by force, and they make their users infamous, or famous, as well as placing them outside the law. If you find yourself with those powers, arguably you’re obligated to go use them in order to preserve the peace, or to help people-powered change succeed. That’s the point of Spider-Man comics.  And if you’ve got an unquenchable thirst for adventure and you don’t want to work with the cops, maybe you pick up a bow and arrow and spend a fortune on purple clothes.

But what kind of person for real and literally wants to take big risks in order to be a Hulk? Do you want that person to become a Hulk? (That said, I might inject myself with weird blood in order to get Doug Ramsey’s powers.) I’m just not surprised or impressed by what the Booths want to do.

Armaan: Of course, the Booths are a lot nicer than the Intelligencia are. Really, they don’t have the worst motivations. As far as I can tell, they don’t want to rob banks or enact vengeance or anything like that. They just think having Hulk powers would be kind of cool. Instead of horrible subterfuge to steal Jen’s blood, they just steal from the vials stored by Reed Richards and Tony Stark, who frankly DESERVE to be stolen from. WHY are these men just keeping vials of her blood around? NOTHING good comes from having men like Richards and Stark holding onto clone-able vials of your blood (or Sinister, for that matter, but we’ll leave that discussion for the X-Books)!

Stephanie: Tony Stark is a ball of ridiculous and I have no objection to stealing from him. That said, science people should absolutely keep vials of weird blood around for research. Real-life science types do it! Jen’s blood could hold the key to a new rare disease. I’m OK with Reed keeping a vial around.

I’m also OK with the art in She-Hulk #8, from Takeshi Miyazawa, which has to serve a story that’s all backstory. It’s easy to follow, though in the first half it feels like illustration: our narrator, who stays close to April’s point of view, tells us what we need to know.

A Low-Keyes Disaster

Armaan: Surprising no one but the Booths, trying to mad-scientist your way into superpowers has disastrous results. Mark tragically loses his intelligence, and the ability to even transform from his Hulked-out self to his normal self. April, in the meanwhile, grows a Leader-sized brain. The better of the deal, I’d think, despite the constant headaches that come with it.

Stephanie: The rest of her body also shrinks. Now we know why. Armaan, do I need to research the Leader now?

Our subtitle, by the way, points to Daniel Keyes’ short story (later expanded into a novel) “Flowers for Algernon,” in which an experimental treatment augments the intelligence of first a mouse, and then a cognitively disabled man….temporarily. It’s famously sad. I’m not sure it’s aged well, given changing attitudes towards intellectual disabilities, but it sure used up a lot of hankies, and won a Hugo award, in its time.

Armaan: The tragedy is definitely Mark losing his intelligence, becoming little more than a large, hulking brute. As April scrambles to find out what went wrong, we fill in some of the blanks. It turns out replicating Jen’s blood wasn’t enough for the transformation to work. They need to drain her unique radiation to stabilize what Jen’s blood has done to them.

As we’re constantly reminded, Jack’s drained Jen’s radiation before — and with that, the last puzzle piece falls into place, as it seems clear that April brought Jack back in an attempt to use his powers to drain Jen once again. It’s a neat bit of continuity there, because when Jack drained her the first time, she didn’t lose her Hulk-abilities; she lost control over them. 

Stephanie: And that’s why you’ve brought us all here today. I’m still not sure I understand the scheme: Jack’s supposed to drain Jen’s radiation, store it up in his own body, and then irradiate Mark with it? And April will cause Jack to help Mark because….? I guess we’ll find out soon.

Armaan: This is a sweet, sad tale, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me. I’m not sure if they’re the most compelling She-Hulk villains, though. I think the Booths are the kind of villains that I’d be excited to see for a single-issue fight here, a panel there, co-starring in a throwaway event tie-in miniseries maybe, but as the villainous minds behind an 8-issue arc? Their backstory definitely wasn’t worth the wait — nor did I feel it deserved an entire issue to itself. Every now and again an issue like this comes along that makes me miss the days of older, denser comics, where villain backstories would involve a floating head, bitter captions and two pages, at the most. 

Stephanie: You know how some meetings could have been an email and some emails could have been a text? This comic could have been two pages. Or six pages split into two-page spreads interrupting a comic book about the complicated and sometimes ridiculous heroes we read this comic to see. Heroes who (yay!) Rainbow Rowell understands quite well, and who will come back to see us next issue.

Last Minute Legal Notes

• As with most issues in this run, its ending feels abrupt. The pacing feels off. You think I’d be used to it by now, but no. 
• The Booths’ mutual misery at needing a control device for Mark hits hard.
• It doesn’t matter how many times I see it or how sad she is, April’s giant head makes me giggle every time. She looks like a chibi character!

Armaan Babu

Stephanie Burt

Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her podcast about superhero role playing games is Team-Up Moves, with Fiona Hopkins; her latest book of poems is We Are Mermaids.  Her nose still hurts from that thing with the gate.